I really love this idea in having Watson recommending recipes, literally having Watson cook. For better food than the one I cooked this week at a cooking school after the IBM Connect Comes To You event from holistic.net in Hanover:
Watson, who first made headlines with its win on Jeopardy, was at it again at SxSW, delighting hundreds of people with two new recipes every day. The computer can’t actually cook, but it knows how unexpected ingredient combinations will taste, even predicting whether you’ll find its concoctions pleasant, familiar or surprising.
“It came up with combinations and ingredients I’d never imagine myself,” said James Briscione, the director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education, IBM’s partner in the project. But they worked. …
We know that Watson can crunch numbers, identify patterns, predict outcomes. But IBM wanted to prove that Watson can also be creative. …
But let’s look at the Watson food truck from another perspective. That of marketing. For that’s what really made this effort creative. It took an experience, mixed in some crowdsourcing, added a dash of social media and served up a perfectly prepared case study in how to generate awareness and participation.
Think about it. Watson is a computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies for the field of open domain question answering. Not all that exciting as marketing fodder.
And this is a company that used to be called Big Blue; it was safe, corporate, boring and populated by engineers who wore short sleeve dress shirts. Now look at them. …
If someone had told me five or 10 years ago that IBM would be one of the coolest marketers on the planet, I’d have thought they were crazy.
via Watson Powered Lunch Truck at SXSW | Social Media Today.
